


as constant as a northern star

by katplanet



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Biting, Drug Use, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Vague Alternate History, Vampire Klaus, Vampire-Typical Blood Stuff, Vampire-Typical Homoerotic Melodrama, human dave
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 12:13:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29575935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katplanet/pseuds/katplanet
Summary: "Dead people are still people," Dave says."Well," Klaus says, "that depends on who you ask.""They are if you ask me.""You and plenty of other nice folks who believe in the sanctity of the immortal soul," and Klaus is leaning in even closer, now, elbows on his knees, "except then the issue becomes that there are certain expectations of traditional deadness that I fail to meet."
Relationships: Klaus Hargreeves/David "Dave" Katz
Comments: 8
Kudos: 32
Collections: EnKlave Fest 2021





	as constant as a northern star

**Author's Note:**

> written for the enklave fest 2021 prompt: vampires
> 
> adding vampires to an actual historical war felt maybe a little gauche, so i invented one instead. if there are flying cars in tua there can also be an armed conflict in the north american taiga

There's a man at the foot of Dave's cot. Which could have woken Dave up on its own, but then there’s a bang, a yell, the tap of gunfire somewhere in the gut of the forest. That all goes at the top of the list of things to deal with, and Dave's shrugging into his flak jacket well before he hears the CO start shouting outside. The whole tent comes alive around him. Grumbling and cursing, the cold clicks of magazines slotting into receivers.

Dave swings his legs over the side of his cot, which there's still a man at the foot of. He's staring at Dave, or possibly at the middle distance between them. Motionless and pale, a little glassy in the eyes, mouth hanging open and - ah.

The CO comes barging through the tent flap, takes one look at the man on the ground between them, and says, "Thank fuck."

Dave's got his fatigues on and his boots laced, and this new guy is still crouched there in the dirt, blinking up at everything. Maybe he just got flown in, hasn't gotten the sedative out of his system yet. Maybe he hasn't - hasn't eaten in a while.

"On your feet, private," the CO says, and the man doesn’t move.

What’ll happen next is the CO will repeat himself, and then he’ll repeat himself louder, and then he’ll grab the man by the scruff and probably scare the living daylights out of him, no pun intended, and none of them have time for that. So Dave leans forward, ducks until he’s level with the man’s eyes.

"Hey," Dave says to him, as kindly as he can manage with the CO looming, with the gunfire in the distance getting closer. "What's your name?"

The man focuses on him. "Klaus."

"Hey, Klaus," Dave says. "I'm Dave. They dropped you in at a hell of a time. You good to be on your feet?"

"Katz," the CO says.

"Yeah, um," Klaus says. He's wearing nothing but a towel and a penny lane coat, and he's got a briefcase in his hand. Dave reaches for it, but Klaus yanks it back, eyes going wide. His chest is slick with someone's blood.

"Sorry," Dave says. "Is that your gear, in there?"

Klaus looks down at the case in his hand, looks back at Dave. "Gear," he repeats.

Whatever he got given for the trip, it's still in him. That kind of shit tends to affect the night shift longer. Should have had his dose adjusted for it, but here he is, doped out of his head, and they're getting shot at. They're getting shot at a lot.

"Listen," Dave says. "We've got people dying in the trees. Can you help?"

Klaus furrows his brow, but he nods. He struggles up onto his feet, and Dave goes with him, supports him with a hand on his elbow.

The CO's being patient, but the way he's looking at Dave means the clock on that is running down. So Dave grabs a pair of lined trousers from his own pack and helps Klaus into them, cinches them around his narrower waist. He’s so thin. Not that it matters.

Somewhere too close, someone shouts in a very particular way that Dave has come to recognize.

"Okay," he says to Klaus as the CO goes barreling out of the tent again, priorities rearranged. "C'mon, soldier."

Klaus looks at Dave. Studies him, his face, his fatigues. And then he turns on his bare heel and slides like oil into the dark.

Dave forgets about him for a while. He forgets about most things. There's a switch in him, maybe one that he installed when his boots first hit the soil, maybe one that's always been there. He flips it and turns off. Becomes a body, which moves, stays still, moves again.

It goes on, the faint shapes through the trees, the crackling firefights, the crunch of the permafrost, until it's over and Dave is alone in the woods. He stands there like a trunk. Counts out through the rings inside himself until he's filled back up to his edges.

He makes the return hike to camp with his flashlight dimmed, his breath clouding out in front of his mouth. Doesn't look anywhere that isn't in front of his feet. They’ll scout back this way tomorrow, or they won’t.

Klaus is back for the headcount, too. He looks a little less dazed, a little more exhausted. Dave would try to catch his eye if he didn’t have his chin down, his shoulders hunched in. Not an unfamiliar pose after a fight, but odd paired with the stillness of his body. He looks dead.

They’ve been carrying the old lockbox with them ever since - well. They couldn’t leave it behind to fall into the wrong hands. So after the headcount, after triage, in the last moments they have before sunrise, the CO takes Klaus over to it, spins the combination and pops the lid. He loads Klaus's gear case into the foot of it, turns to Klaus, tells him something.

Klaus looks at the lockbox for a while. He looks at it, then up at the sky through the evergreens, the faint navy glow of pre-dawn. He shuts his eyes, steps one foot into the box, then the other. Lies down in it, disappears from Dave’s view.

The CO shuts the lid, bolts it. Seals out what little light makes it through the trees.

℘

Dave volunteers to be a pallbearer. It seems like the thing to do. Everyone else is being antsy about it, and anyway, Klaus had been so disoriented. It might be nice for him to hear a familiar voice, if he wakes up during the day.

So he grabs the handle on the front end, the one that arches out from the box in a semicircle so he can hold it and still walk forward. It’s got two fabric straps to put over his shoulders and take some of the weight, which he settles in place with his pack. Mackie gets talked into taking the back, and they saddle up and head out into the forest.

They march north, mostly. Dave’s palms go slippery around the rubber grip of the handle. He talks to one of the boys from Louisiana, lets him ramble about his job at the chop shop back home while they haul themselves through the frozen coils of undergrowth. Dave tries not to jostle the lockbox too much, but his arms start to ache, the extra pressure on his shoulders drives him down into the dirt.

He can’t feel Klaus moving at all, never notices a shift in the weight he’s carrying. Not that Klaus would have much room to move, if he wanted to.

The CO has them set up camp in a spot that looks a hell of a lot like the last spot they set up camp in. Dave and Mackie put the lockbox down in the trees near the tents. Mackie scuttles right off, but Dave hangs back, waits for the CO to come over and let Klaus out.

“You babysitting?” he asks as he spins the lock.

“Somebody should,” Dave says.

“Careful,” is all the CO says before he unseals the lid and heads back toward the other men.

Klaus looks for all the world like he’s sleeping. His eyes shut, lashes fanned out over his pale skin. He’s striking, fine delicate features, and - no reason for Dave not to admit to himself where that train of thought is going. Where it’s already gone, if he’s being honest. It’s harmless.

“You all right, Klaus?” Dave asks him.

Klaus’s eyes flicker open, and he sits up. Wrinkles his nose, stretches out his arms. “I’ve slept in honest-to-god coffins more comfortable than this thing. Where are we?”

“Still the woods,” Dave says. “Not all of us can move as fast as you.”

Klaus tilts his head, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, okay. Which woods?”

“Very funny.”

“Nobody’s joking, I’m afraid,” Klaus says. He leans an elbow on the edge of the box, puts his chin in his hand. “You’ll have to forgive me, I’ve had a hell of a couple of days.”

Dave looks at him, at the dried blood still on his chest. There’s more of it than there had been when Dave first saw him. “Are you - did they not tell you where they were dropping you?”

“Who’s they? Those assholes in the masks?”

“Klaus,” Dave says, carefully. “How did you get here?”

“That,” Klaus says, “is a good question.”

Dave sits down, right in the dirt next to the box. Klaus watches him with his bright green eyes. He moves his head, and the light from camp catches yellow in the pits of them, flat and smooth.

“Where’s the last place you remember being?” Dave asks him.

“Jesus.” Klaus looks down at his own hand. There’s a tattoo on his palm - _hello,_ in big bold capital letters. "A hotel room? No, a bus. I was on a bus."

"The bus out of Fort Smith?"

"Fort Smith," Klaus says. He gives Dave a quick once-over. "Okay. Dave, right?"

"Right."

Klaus leans out over the edge of the box. "Here's where I lose you, Dave. You ready?"

"Sure thing."

"What year is it?"

"1974," Dave says, without thinking.

Klaus doesn't go any more pale than he already is, but his eyes flick to his left, where his briefcase must still be sitting in the foot of the lockbox. "No shit," he says.

"Have you, um. Have you been - been asleep?"

"Yeah," Klaus says, "something like that."

"How did you get recruited while you were asleep?"

"Long story." Klaus looks back at Dave. "Aren't you cold?"

"Hm? Oh." Dave glances down at himself. His single layer fatigues, his bare hands. "You get used to it out here."

"I suppose _you_ do."

“Ah. I mean, hey, that's one less thing you've got to worry about."

That makes Klaus smile properly. He has a lovely smile to match his lovely face, big and bold and crinkly. His canines just sharp enough to give pause. "I'll stick to worrying about getting shot, shall I?"

"Do you even," Dave says, and stops himself.

Klaus leans even farther out of the box and, incidentally, even closer to Dave. "This," he says, "is the armed conflict where mass-produced silvertipped bullets really come into fashion. I think," he adds, "but honestly, sometimes Pogo's lessons were word soup, you know?"

"Was Pogo your DI?"

"You are so cute," Klaus says, like that's a thing people say to each other. "Are you here to keep me in line, or do I get to go play with the other kids?"

"You can do whatever you want," Dave says. "I just thought - you seemed a little out of it, before."

"Yeah, speaking of which. You got anything that'll put some life in these bones?"

Dave looks over his shoulder at camp, the guys passing a joint around their gas heater and pointedly not watching Dave. "They'll probably share, sure."

"Lovely," Klaus says, and he unfurls all his bony limbs, stands up still dressed in nothing but Dave's trousers. Dave had tried to be polite about what his eyes had gotten up to when he helped Klaus put them on. He'd mostly succeeded. "Join me? I'm very shy."

"Sure," Dave says, and he takes the hand Klaus offers to help him up. It's cool and dry, like bark. It says _good bye_ on the palm.

℘

Klaus isn't shy.

"Fuck right off," he says, grinning with every single one of his teeth, roach balanced between the tips of his finger and his thumb. "You personally saw Hendrix. Live, with your own eyes."

"I mean, yeah," Mackie says.

"I know about a hundred people who would suck your dick on principle."

"Well, shit, are they here?"

"One of 'em," Klaus says, and he keeps smiling his big pretty smile, and Dave gears up to stop him from getting punched, but Mackie just laughs. "What'd he play, handsome?"

Mackie lists off what he played, or what he remembers him playing, or what he thinks Klaus would be most impressed by him having played. Klaus leans forward like a schoolboy, his chin in his cupped hands. Only ruins the image once by polishing off the roach and dropping it in the dirt. He pretends to swoon after, flops his legs out and rests his wrist against his forehead, and then he rolls to the side and grabs somebody's tin and rolling papers.

He's been doing this every night. Climbing out of the lockbox and into whatever dinner circle Dave's found himself part of, dredging up some question and chatting long enough to get himself a joint. It's transparent. If he wasn't the first new conversation partner they'd had in months, it probably wouldn't be working.

It's Mackie tonight, his boots unlaced, feet stuck as close to the gas heater as he can get them without burning his toes off. Avery and Smitty still working on dinner. Dover, sitting just near enough for warmth, in what Dave might call companionable silence, if he was feeling generous.

"What about you, Dave?" Klaus asks him. "Best show you've been to."

"Gene Pitney."

Klaus looks at Dave for a second. "Who?"

Dave looks back at him. "Gene - Gene Pitney. Town without pity? Only love can break a heart?"

"Fuck, uh - sing it for me."

"It was on the radio for months."

"Guess I'm from a town without Pitney," Klaus says, beaming pleased with himself, and Dave laughs out loud. "No, c'mon, sing it, remind me. I'm being stupid."

Dave tries and fails to remember the last time he sang something. Clears his throat, lifts his voice up into Gene's range, or something close to it. He makes it through _only love can mend it_ before he stops and takes a drink out of his flask. Maybe a longer drink than he really needs.

When he looks back up, Klaus is staring again. It's not a bad stare, just a - just a stare. "Never heard it," he says.

"You have. I didn't do it justice."

"You did," Klaus says, and he leaves it at that.

Dave takes another drink. "Not as sexy as Hendrix, in any case. I went with my mom."

"And that's the best show you've been to," Avery says from the other side of the heater.

"Those weren't the kind of tours coming through 'Nam."

Avery hums, toasts with his can of beans. "Okay, Chops. Your turn."

Klaus barely pauses at the name, but his grin gets a little wider. "I have no idea who the band was," he says, "but it was in a warehouse, right? And oh my god, I have never had that many people sweat on me in such a short period of time."

Dave had been about to drink. He's glad he didn't.

"What," Mackie says, "that’s a good thing?"

“Just means everybody’s on the same page, you know?” Klaus always rolls his joints without even looking at them, clever nimble fingers, and every single one of them comes out better than any of Dave’s ever have. “Show’s no fun if the crowd’s standing still. People gotta get into it.”

"This place lets your type in?"

"Well, yeah," Klaus says, and he tucks the end of his joint into the corner of his mouth. "We keep the party alive all night, baby."

He sticks his hand over in Dave's direction, _good bye_ up, and beckons with his fingers. Dave pulls his lighter out of his pocket, puts it in Klaus's palm.

"What made it good?" Dave asks him.

"Well," Klaus says, and then he lights up, sucks smoke in and puffs it back out in rings. His chest moves once, out and in, and then goes still again. "This was right after I died."

There's no real way to gauge how anybody else takes it when Klaus says the things he says. It'll torpedo the whole evening if Dave lets it settle, though, so he picks it up, tosses it back, says, "What, _right_ after?"

"I mean, a month or so." Klaus takes another drag. "And I hadn't felt like - like myself in a while, I guess. Definitely not since I died. Maybe before that, too. But I was dancing with people, listening to music, and nobody was looking at me. Lost in the crowd. Like I wasn't even there."

"And that made you feel like yourself?"

"I didn't _not_ feel like myself." Klaus is still smiling, the quick little points of his teeth peeking out from behind his lips. "Plus," he says, "that was the night I figured out speed still worked on me. Which might've been doing more for my vibe than the show was, looking back."

"I wasn't gonna be stoned for Hendrix," Mackie says, "but then I walked in the door and took a breath, you know?"

Klaus takes one more pull in direct response to that. He holds what's left of the joint out to Dave, one eyebrow arched higher than the other, so Dave takes it, finishes it off while Smitty talks about the orchestra his sister plays in back home.

Dave hangs around Klaus and the heater while everybody else finishes up dinner and scatters off to their tents. Mackie stays and shoots the shit with them until he starts nodding, and Dover clears out after he does, fades back into the dark. Leaves Dave and Klaus side by side, quiet.

Quiet, at least, until Klaus groans and stretches out his legs, arches his back, sticks his arms up above his head and holds it all in rictus until he slumps back down to the dirt. “I,” he says, looking at Dave over his shoulder, “have not been this sore since the last time I spent an evening with five men.”

"I thought you didn't get sore," Dave says. "Just sleepy."

Klaus narrows his eyes. "Who told you that?"

"Am I right?"

Klaus's eyes stay slits, but they tug up into crescents when he smiles. "Maybe I want to fit in. Be achy with the cool kids."

“I think it’s cooler that you don’t get achy, to be honest.”

“Yeah, but it spooks people, doesn’t it?” Klaus turns to face him, which puts their knees much closer together than they had been before. If Dave turned as well, they’d bump into each other. "I curl up in a box all day and pop out at night with nary a cramp."

Dave could shrug it off. A few days ago, he would have. Tonight, he says, "Better than you wiggling around all day while I lug you through the woods."

Klaus's laugh fills up his whole face, makes his body sway with the abrupt rush of it. "Oh, yeah, okay, god forbid I decide I want to lie motionless on my right side instead of my left side."

"You better pick and commit or I'll drop you."

"Really, though," Klaus says, and he's peering at Dave now, curious. "Who told you?"

"We had a guy," Dave says. "Like you."

Klaus says, "Had."

"Yeah," Dave says.

"I mean, I've got his old digs, right? S'pose it's a lucky break for me."

Dave looks down at his hands, flexes his fingers. His knuckles lag in the cold.

"What happened?" Klaus asks him.

"You really wanna know?"

"No," Klaus says, "but I'd still appreciate it if you told me."

"They pried the lid off the lockbox," Dave says. "Right there in the middle of the day. We couldn't make it over in time, and he, um."

"I thought so. I can smell him."

Dave glances back up at Klaus, the faint pink of his mouth. Klaus isn't smiling anymore. "I'm sorry."

"I can smell a lot of things," Klaus says, and doesn't elaborate.

"It's not gonna happen again," Dave tells him.

"No?"

"We're not gonna let it."

"You seem real sure about that."

"You're part of the patrol," Dave says. "We'll protect you when you can't protect yourself. That's the deal."

"Deals usually go both ways."

"Sure," Dave says, "but you're holding up your end just fine."

"Which is?"

"Protect us when _we_ can't protect ourselves."

"Dunno how good I am at protecting," Klaus says. "Not a hundred percent success rate, historically."

"We haven't lost anybody since you dropped in," Dave says. "That's not nothing."

"Give it time," Klaus says, looking down at his boots.

Dave could argue that, except Klaus is being realistic, and they haven't seen action since that first night anyway, so he doesn't. He checks on his own feet, makes sure his laces are still tied.

"So you talked to this guy?" Klaus asks him, the airy voice he gets when he's fresh out of the box and looking for company. "About his aches and pains, or lack thereof?"

"He palled around with me sometimes. He wasn't exactly spoiled for choice."

"Everybody here seems pretty friendly to me."

"You're easy to be friendly to," Dave says, which Klaus must already know, but an inch of his smile comes back anyway. "Not like he was awful or anything, just, you know. Quiet."

"I know the type," Klaus says, "believe me. How old was he?"

"Older than you," Dave says. "Older than you and me combined, probably."

"Some of us run out of things to say, after long enough."

The camp is as subdued as it ever gets, the faint sounds of bodies shifting, settling in. Klaus reaches down and fishes a little baggie out of his boot - and where he got his supply so quick, Dave can only guess, but he's seen Klaus and Avery talking out of earshot, and Avery's had that look about him lately, too awake and not awake enough. Klaus plucks out one tablet, sets it down on the bottom of an empty rations can. Starts crushing it into powder with the underside of a spoon.

"I don't think everybody here saw him as someone that they could talk to," Dave says. "You know?"

"I know," Klaus says. He gets everything all lined up, pulls a trimmed-down straw out of his baggie. "I can't talk to boomers either, honestly."

"Boomers?"

"Yeah, like - oh, shit. It's, um. East coast slang?"

"For what?"

"God, he wouldn't have been a boomer, would he." Klaus frowns down at his can. "You're not even a boomer. Time is - ugh."

"I think," Dave says, "you might wanna cut down on the grass, Chops."

Klaus peeks up out of the corner of his eye and winks. "I keep my lawn well-manicured, thank you very much."

He finishes up his whole ritual. Stores his straw back in his baggie, twists it up and sticks it down his boot again.

"People like them don't know how to talk to people like me," Klaus says, once all that is done. "They only know how to talk to people they think are people."

"You're a person," Dave says.

"I'm dead," Klaus says.

"Dead people are still people."

"Well," Klaus says, "that depends on who you ask."

"They are if you ask me."

"You and plenty of other nice folks who believe in the sanctity of the immortal soul," and Klaus is leaning in even closer, now, elbows on his knees, "except then the issue becomes that there are certain expectations of traditional deadness that I fail to meet."

"That's not gonna make you any worse for conversation. Probably the opposite, actually."

Klaus laughs at that. "Yeah, chattier than a corpse, that's me."

"You're a person," Dave says again, just to make sure it's out between them where it needs to be. "They all know that."

"Living things only know how to relate to each other because it's happening on a schedule." Klaus's hands are moving, always moving except for when they're not. They're moving now, pulling a half-smashed carton of cigarettes out of his borrowed too-big jacket. "There's, like, a shared understanding that things have to change. Things have to happen before it's too late. Dead things stay still. They're stuck."

"You're moving."

"I'm moving in place," Klaus says. "I'm running on a treadmill."

"So you're not quite dead," Dave says.

"Too dead for the living."

"Not as dead as you could be."

Klaus pauses with a cigarette halfway to his mouth, Dave's lighter in his other hand. He looks at Dave through his lashes. "Yeah," he says, "I guess you know that firsthand, huh?"

"Everybody here knows that firsthand."

Klaus gets his cigarette the rest of the way up to perch between his lips. "Well," he says, "maybe I'm on a schedule with the rest of you, then."

"We've got you penciled in," Dave says, and Klaus smiles while he lights up. A new smile, quiet, no teeth.


End file.
